In this special podcast, Professor Rab Houston discusses some of the interesting questions that you have raised by listeners during the first series. He explains how he undertakes his research… Read more »

The first episode in our new podcast series – The Voice of the Mad – will be broadcast on Tuesday June 27th. This second series, which comprises 26 podcasts, uses… Read more »

We’d love to hear what you thought of the podcasts, and here’s your chance to let us know. We’ve put together a short questionnaire to get your feedback, and if… Read more »

Today’s podcast brings us to the end of Series 1 in the History of Psychiatry podcast series. In the space of 44 episodes, we have explored psychiatry from its very… Read more »

Historians may find it easier than clinicians or scientists to write compassionately about sufferers from mental problems, especially as they are writing about those who are long dead. Unhindered by… Read more »

History shows us where we have been. Yet the lessons it offers are not simply examples of what to emulate and what to avoid. Some time back, the archivist of… Read more »

This week, May 8th – 14th, is Mental Health Awareness Week.  In this blog post, Rab explains how the podcast series has aimed to help increase awareness of mental health… Read more »

With only two more podcasts to go in this first series on the history of psychiatry, we can start to look ahead to a second series which we will begin to… Read more »

When we talk about psychiatry and its history we delve deeply into all aspects of human life: mind and body, emotions and experiences, thoughts and moods, the self and others,… Read more »

Diagnoses such as autism are less than a century old. Other conditions, now central to our concerns about mental wellbeing, were hidden in the past, though this time because the… Read more »

It might seem odd to be plugging someone else’s podcasts, but I wanted to tell you about a BBC series by a colleague at Edinburgh University called Chris Harding, which… Read more »

The last podcast argued that apparent changes in the diagnosis of mental disorders probably had more to do with developments in science and society, than with shifts in the incidence… Read more »

Have you met Julia yet? Sesame Street has just introduced a character called Julia, who is autistic.  Julia is a little girl with orange hair and a little toy rabbit,… Read more »

Controversial, notorious, radical, revolutionary – flick through the reviews of Robert Mullan’s Mad to be Normal and you’ll find the same words used again and again to describe RD Laing,… Read more »

Looking back in time, we might think that life was easier, but that the transition from small-scale, largely agrarian societies brought about by industrialization and urbanization during the nineteenth century… Read more »

We conclude this block of podcasts by showing what insights can be gained into the mind of the suicide, using historical evidence. The podcast sets out how survivors struggled to… Read more »

Rab reflects on similarities between the treatment of mental disorders in low-resource countries today and in Britain two or three centuries ago. I have often talked to both academic scientists working on the… Read more »

In this podcast Rab outlines historic patterns of suicide and explores attitudes towards it. Historic suicide resembles modern in important regards such as the predominance of males among those who… Read more »

Before the nineteenth or even twentieth century a lot of what we know about suicide in England and Wales comes from the records of coroners’ inquests.  This reliance on inquests… Read more »

On Tuesday 14 February 2017 I had a long, friendly, and stimulating meeting in Edinburgh with the well-known and successful American novelist Rachel Simon. Rachel is the award-winning author of… Read more »